Capitoline Hill

Roman tradition dated the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, "Jupiter Best and Greatest," to the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, and its dedication to the first year of the Republic, 509 BCE, making the temple and the Republic coeval in Roman civic memory. It stood on the hill's southern summit, sharing the peak with a citadel, the Arx, on the northern summit, where the temple of Juno Moneta, "Juno the Warner" or "Juno of the Mint," gave its epithet to the Roman mint established beside it and, through that association, to the English word money itself. The temple housed a triad of gods rather than Jupiter alone: Jupiter in the central chamber, with Juno and Minerva in flanking chambers on either side, a grouping scholars call the Capitoline Triad and read as the state cult's central expression of Rome's protection under its chief god and his two divine companions.

A Roman general awarded a triumph, the ceremonial procession celebrating a major military victory, processed through the city to the Capitoline and concluded the rite at the temple's altar, sacrificing to Jupiter and laying his laurels at the god's feet, so that the hill functioned as the ritual terminus of the Republic's highest military honor as much as a site of everyday worship. Nearby, the Tarpeian Rock, a cliff on the hill's southern face, served through the early Republic as a site of execution for traitors and, according to tradition, took its name from Tarpeia, a Vestal who betrayed the citadel to the Sabines and was killed for it.

The temple burned in 83 BCE during civil unrest and was rebuilt by Sulla, then burned again in 69 CE, deliberately, during the fighting between the emperor Vitellius and the forces backing Vespasian, an act ancient writers treated as a particular sacrilege precisely because it targeted the state's most sacred building.

Vespasian and then his son Domitian rebuilt it a final time, on a still grander scale, and it stood into late antiquity before Christianization and the general decline of traditional Roman cult left it to slow ruin and, eventually, quarrying for building stone, so that almost nothing of the ancient temple remains visible above ground today.

The hill's second life began in the Italian Renaissance, when Pope Paul III commissioned Michelangelo to redesign its summit as the Piazza del Campidoglio, the trapezoidal civic square, ringed by palazzi and centered on a bronze equestrian statue, that still crowns the hill and today houses Rome's city government and the Capitoline Museums. That civic reuse, layered directly over the vanished religious one, is also why capitol, by way of the Capitoline's name, became the generic English word for a legislative building on a height, most famously the United States Capitol in Washington, itself named in conscious reference to Rome's ancient hill rather than to any surviving structure on it.